Hello! I'm Royal Jules and I am a slam poet and spoken word artist from Ft. Lauderdale.

Memories of us is a sleep paralysis demon in the dark corner of my room

It’s 3 AM and I can’t sleep

I’m a restless whirlpool tangled in my sheets

And the demon makes it’s way over in graceful malice

Dressed in dirty looks and snarky comments

Which smells like bad news

Like heartbreak

Like that sinking feeling at the bottom of your stomach

It reeks like rubbing alcohol

Slithers into bed with me

Spoons me in his scales

Slime and grime collide

Confine me

He makes me swallow my cries like broccoli

Like “Don’t make me go over there and feed you myself”

Like “chew...and now swallow”

“I said swallow”

And I do

Complied to abide

They burn going down my throat like raw lemonade

That tastes like our last argument

Like the end of our relationship

He whispers our memories in my ear like bedtime stories

In between salacious sighs

I can feel his slithery snakey tongue tickle my terrified tragus

Remembering hurts

My brain is on fire

Yet I can’t seem to burn our memories

Can’t seem to turn them into ash

To ash dust to dust

Because you’re not dead to me

Yet

I bet you think this poem is about you

And I wish I could look into your crystallized snake eyes

And tell you it isn’t

Not this one but the other one

Not both

Not all three

Not all four

Trying to disguise the fact that I miss you with every diss

Wish I could say that I don’t have a whole portion of my notebook dedicated to you

Just to dig a grave to bury you in

Because I’m smarter than to waste my time on you again

Because late at night when I can’t sleep I remember

I remember that before I hated you

Before I hated you, you knew how to make me laugh

How I thought I made a friend for life

How I could peel back all my layers and stand in nude vulnerability in front of you

And I almost throw up my swallowed cries

Almost let every single memory flood out of my body in a tsunami of tears

Every poem is a lit match

Burning away my feelings

The memories

The good times

The day the thought of you began to piss me off

The sound of your voice

The syllables in your name

The image of your face

Every poem is burning sage

Ridding my mind of your evil spirits

Of the psycho you really are

Of the way you made me feel worthless

Like loose change thrown into wishing wells

Like loose change, you don’t bother to pick up when it falls on the floor

Like loose change that gets stepped on in the city that never sleeps

Smothered by the dirt and germs underneath people’s feet

I lay cocooned in pain

The demon fades away with every flickering droop of my eyelids

Knowing his mission is complete

As I pray for sleep to take me away

In hopes that maybe I will have forgotten all about you by morning